Musings on World events from the perspective of a Social and an Economic Liberal.

Monday, February 26, 2007

More Bl@@dy rules!

Oh No!

David Cameron announces that he intends to spend some vast amount of money "to improve border security".

The trouble is that every time John Reid or another one of these clowns starts making some meaningless grandstanding gesture it delays me another five minutes at the Airport when I come back into my own country.

On Saturday after a six hour delay in Copenhagen- an ice storm, and no, don't ask me why I was coming back from Tallinn via Copenhagen- I had to wait for over half an hour just to show my passport at the European channel.

I would like to congratulate the Home Secretary on his competence- but I can't.

Both Cameron and Reid are in the business of gestures.

Personally I would like to make a fairly strong two fingered gesture at them both.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hmm. Unusually vitriolic Consul. Other countries have Border police forces. Hardly fascist is it. Cameron has sternly opposed ID cards which given the record of seemingly every IT project ever mounted in this country really is gesture stuff. Cameron's conservatives are much more libertarian than you pretend. To compare Cameron with Reid is laughable, and also damaging to those Lib Dem candidates fishing for Libertarian Tory votes in new Lib/Lab marginals. Bet you see the 2005 trend repeated again.

delay the public 5 minutes or protect the public from illegal immigration, terrorism, drug smuggling, people smuggling, arms trafficing, proliferation, espionage.

I can see it's a toughie.

Arguing that these are empty gestures or ineffectual measures is one thing. Claiming they are wrong because you were delayed 5 minutes is a weak argument. Taken to it's logical conclusion we would abandon border controls completely.

rk- That is not the issue: in any event it is an extra five minutes each time one of these "initiatives" gets going- so my last wait was over 30 minutes. Since we are not checking exits, the wait is basically a waste of time.

Cameron a libertarian?? Er no. Cameron and Reid are two guys on the same pendulum- lots of motion, no movement. They both compete to give the the most meaningless populist gesture possible.

Sorry Cicero utter ****** if I may say so bluntly. If Cameron was like Reid we would now have 90 day detention, comedians would be in Jail under the Religious Hatred Bill, and ID cards would be in place already. A plausible argument by you but one with which I would have disagreed with would be to say Cameron whil some way Libertarian is still not far enough. To say he is the same as Reid though is nonsense. Come on Consul you can do better than this.

Lepidus- I think you are on very shaky ground claiming Cameron as any kind of libertarian. I also think that the attempt by the Conservatives to claim the traditionally Liberal ground of civil liberties is pretty unconvincing. In government the Conservatives have tended to favour the populist rather than the effective anti-crime options: so you always try to paint the Lib Dems as soft on crime when we advocate something other than the most draconian options.

The instinct of the Conservatives has never been in favour of human rights in government- and Cameron's fine words butter no parsnips. The Tories hestiated before they opposed 90 day detention: the Liberal Democrats already knew that it was against their principles. In government the Tories would have enacted the same legislation (like they did in Northern Ireland). The Conservatives initially supported ID cards- the Liberal Democrats opposed them from the get go.

Bear in mind that Cameron's intellectual furniture allows him to speak in favour of freedom and compulsion when addressing his policies towards absent fathers. "And" Conservatism is trying to be all things to all men and it is profoundly dishonest.